A Tester whose bug reports are so passive aggressive that developers interpret them as being rude.

• Can mutate into: “The Blamer” QA
• Dangerous when coupled with: “The Diva” Developer
• Likelihood of fixing: Low
• Danger to project: Low

Problem

Properly filing a bug report is labor intensive and cognitively a heavy process, and there are some QA testers who refuse to put much effort into it. These are usually QA tester with some level of entitlement, as they do not feel that they need to put any effort into their bug reports. It is also common for them to hold a disparaging view of the development team, and do not consider it worth their time to do any type of analysis on the bug: their general statement should be enough to have the development hop to figuring out what was discovered.

Typical bug reports from the Flippant QA tester are as follows:

• “This isn’t working”
• “This is broken again”
• “This problem would be obvious if you actually used it”
• “I’m not sure why this was missed”
• “Test this more thoroughly next time”
• “I don’t know why we can’t get this right.”

Obviously, the developers are less than pleased receiving a bug report where these statements are given instead of steps to reproduce. It is rare that a professional QA analyst would report bugs like this, but they are common when other members of the organization are called upon to report bugs, as this is likely to happen when there is limited time to test an application before a release, and QA short-staffed. The result of adding this “Help” to QA is generally chaos, as bug are being rejected by the developers, creating more strife among the project team, further deepening resentment.

Solution

Generally, QA should be left to professional QA testers. Unfortunately, there is a sentiment in the industry in “anyone can do QA” but this is not true. It is more accurate to say that anyone can discover a bug, but typically only professional QA testers can identify important bugs hidden in edge cases, and report them in a way that the developer can immediately understand, reproduce, and therefore fix.

Normally, the person acting as a Flippant QA tester believes they have every right to be flippant. If they are a member of the QA staff, they should be warned to correct their behavior as it is counterproductive, and not the job that is required of them. If they are part of an auxiliary QA staff brought in to augment the QA department, they should not be allowed to report bugs until they are able to do so professionally.

Often, it is far more efficient to simply remove a Flippant QA tester than to attempt to fix them. Certainly, they have made it clear that they do not wish to do QA testing, so this is most likely in everyone’s best interest.